RESISTANCE TO COLONIALISM: LATIN AMERICAN LEGACIES

University of Chicago Conference: Colonialism and Its Legacies

(Conference Draft 4-04; Subject to Further Revision)1

Ofelia Schutte

University of South Florida

In a lecture presented to the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group meeting at Rice

University in October 1996, the Indian historian Ranajit Guha, founder of the South

Asian Subaltern Studies Group, refers to some of the “salient aspects of modernity’s

intersection with colonialism” (Guha 2001, 41). One of these, which I think characterizes

the Latin American condition just as much as the South Asian, is, in Guha’s words, the

fact that “the colonial experience has outlived decolonization and continues to be related

significantly to the concerns of our own time” (Guha 2001, 42). The very title of our

conference, Colonialism and Its Legacies, is a witness to the truth of this observation.

Whether in the colonized or in the colonialist parts of the world, even after political

decolonization, the aftereffects of colonialism live on, inherent not only in the realm of

politics but in the ordinary daily experiences of the people. This experience to which

Ruha alludes is specifically marked by history. In different parts of the world, historical

specificities distinguish the special characteristics of colonialism’s sequels. The

interpretation of history itself becomes an arena for the exercise of the will to

decolonization—and then by extension, any pedagogical or policy-oriented intellectual

exercise, along with other activities particularly in the spheres of culture and politics.

In this paper, I will highlight the interpretation of history launched in 1891 by José

Martí in his political manifesto “Nuestra América.” I emphasize ideas and themes in the

essay intersecting with our current critical interests regarding postcoloniality and the

resistance to colonialism in Latin America. Because most of Latin America achieved

independence in the nineteenth century, one historical difference vis-à-vis Asia and

Africa is the greater chronological length of our postcolonial period. Nonetheless,

1 In this draft all translations from the Spanish-language texts listed in the Bibliography are my own.

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nineteenth-century political thinkers such as Martí have something to teach us regarding

where we wish to draw the line on the nature of postcolonial thought and its appropriate

methodologies. The interpretation of history itself becomes highly contested since

contemporary interests stand to gain or lose depending on its successful outcome.

One of the guideposts affecting the interpretation of history is the

epistemic/methodological framework informing our discursive practices. Most Spanish

American colonies attained independence during the nineteenth century, thereby

antedating what the West calls “postmodernity.” For this reason, the epistemic

framework that guided Spanish America’s postcolonial criticism has distinct features

differentiating it from late twentieth and early twenty-first century postcolonial critique,

both in Latin America itself and in other parts of the global South. In particular,

arguments for emancipation from colonialism in nineteenth-century Latin America rest

on an acceptance of what Lyotard called the “grand narratives” of emancipation. From

Lyotard’s point of view, such grand narratives are no longer warranted or believable as of

the end of the twentieth century. Yet in order to understand postcolonial critique in the

global South, whether a century ago or in our own time, it is necessary to set aside the

view that postcolonial critical thought must rely on a postmodern (poststructuralist,

deconstructive) epistemic approach. My twenty-first century “conversation” with the

nineteenth-century thought of José Martí takes advantage in part of Edward’s Said

distinction, in his 1994 Afterword to Orientalism, that there is a significant distinction

between “postcolonial” and “postmodern” thought. In particular, Said observed that

postmodernism still tends to be Eurocentric and ahistoric while postcolonial critique

counters these two perspectives (Said 1994, 348-49). Moreover, at least some

postcolonial critics continue for valid reasons to use the grand narratives of emancipation

that seemed useless to Lyotard (1979). Said’s distinction allows Latin Americans to

embrace postcolonial critique without necessarily having to limit their epistemic

standpoints to postmodern tenets. In this case, I think the indispensable targets of

postcolonial critique are the economic, political, and cultural conditions of postcoloniality

and the discussion of strategies needed to reduce or eliminate the effects of colonialism in

the global South. In this regard, both Martí’s thought and the discussion concerning

Cuba’s position in the aftermath of colonialism are of special interest.

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JOSE MARTI’S LEGACY OF “NUESTRA AMERICA”

OR WHOSE NATION? WHOSE CULTURE?

Cuba is one of the most interesting countries in the Western hemisphere when it

comes to the analysis of colonialism and postcoloniality. Unlike most other “Hispanic-

American” nations, which obtained their independence from Spain in the earlier parts of

the century, during Martí’s lifetime (1853-1895) Cuba was still a colony of Spain. A

fervent partisan of Cuba’s national independence, Martí lived abroad for most of his adult

life, often engaged in projects aimed at liberating his native island from colonialism.

Martí lived in New York City during the last period of his short life, from 1881 to 1895

(and prior to departing to fight for Cuba’s independence, where he was killed in May

1895 by Spanish troops). It seems that in addition to sharpening his keen political sense

and his love for that part of the Americas that he called “our America” (nuestra América)

– a term to which I will return in a moment – Martí’s sojourn in the United States allowed

him to conceptualize colonialism as a recurring political system in modern times. He had

a double sense of vision as he envisioned Cuba’s liberation from colonial status. On the

one hand, there was the evident necessary war to be fought against the colonial power,

Spain. But on the other hand, there was the diplomatic struggle to prevent what Martí

foresaw as an emerging economic and political colonialism of the government and

business interests of the United States toward the Hispanic Caribbean, Mexico, Central,

and South America. In the case of Cuba, this meant fighting for Cuba’s independence on

two separate fronts: one, against Spain’s past and current dominance; the other, against

the United States’ emerging and projected future dominance. In the case of the Hispanic

American republics, the struggle Martí proposed was to resist U.S. economic and

political hegemony on political and diplomatic terms. In fact, it seems to me that Martí

probably saw the latter goal as a necessary condition for helping to maintain Cuba’s

independence in the long term. So, while he gave his life for Cuba’s actual independence

from Spain, he was also preparing the ground for a united Latin America resisting the

expansion of U.S. economic and political power over the entire hemisphere.2 Martí

2 Surely Martí did not imagine that – as the twentieth century demonstrated – Cuba would undergo a political revolution that would attempt to resist U.S. hegemony on its own or with the help of an extra-continental power such as the Soviet Union, without the backing of the majority of Hispanic American republics.

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envisioned a united front emerging from Latin America itself, against a second round of

colonialism, this time instigated not by Europe but by what he denominated “la América

europea” [European America] (Fernández Retamar 1979, 13). The name of the collective

entity Martí wished to safeguard from U.S. interventionism and expansionism is what he

called “nuestra América” [our America]. For Martí “our America” was made up of the

indigenous, black, and mestizo populations along with all the peoples whose cultural and

political priorities were to the “natural” and creative humanity found in America rather

than the norms and values imported or received by force from abroad (Martí [1891] 1979,

39). Such peoples would overcome “the hierarchical constitution of the colonies” by the

“democratic organization of the Republic” (Martí [1891], 40). But, at the same time, the

new republics were frail when compared to the huge economic power of the United

States, which he believed was intent on preventing their full development to suit its own

expanding economic interests.

In a famous passage dated from November 1889 at a time when the government of

the United States had organized the first hemispheric congress of American states, Martí

wrote:

From the tyranny of Spain, Spanish America knew how to save itself;

and now, after seeing with judicious eyes the precedents, causes, and

factors of the invitation [to the aforementioned congress], it is urgent to

state – because it is the truth – that for Spanish America the hour has come

to declare its second independence. (Marti [1889-90] 1979, 152)

What is the second independence to be from, if not another form of colonialism? Martí

foresaw a hemispheric pattern of economic domination for the primary benefit of the

interests of the more powerful party. But Martí’s analysis of the economic dependence to

which the Hispanic American countries would be subjected is also based on a cultural

analysis of what he sees as the driving spirit behind the United States’ will to dominance:

“a people that begins to look at freedom, which is the universal and perennial aspiration

of the human being, as its own privilege, and [begins] to invoke it [freedom] in order to

deprive other peoples from it” (Martí [1889-90] 1979, 159). Martí prefaces this analysis

by stating that “one should not see dangers when they are on top of one, but when they

can be prevented. The first [thing] in politics is to make clear and foresee [aclarar y

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prever]” (Martí [1889-90] 1979, 153). Surely, he was able both to foresee and clarify

what was happening, but the political resistance he hoped to see from the Latin American

governments invited to Washington was not to take place. This raises for me at least two

kinds of questions: what is the cost of decolonizing political power, and are people

willing to pay the price? This is somewhat of an existential question, although it is also

subject to disagreements about what one means by “decolonizing.” With regard to this

question, if the cost is too high, and people are not willing to take a stand or make the

sacrifices required for colonialism to be defeated, the legacy of the status quo will

prevail. The second type of question that arises is one of strategy (or political strategies).

Granted that those who benefit from the legacies of colonialism will do all they can to

hold on to and expand their political power, what strategies do they employ to disengage

and defeat their opposition and what strategies, on the other side, can be effective for the

opponents of colonialism and its sequels? In other words, postcolonial political criticism

needs to have both a vision and a strategy if it is to succeed. When we focus on

resistance to colonialism, it seems that a large component of this resistance must be

strategy.

“NUESTRA AMERICA” AS A POLITICAL STRATEGY

Given the fact that Martí had already articulated his view that a “second

independence” was needed for the nineteenth-century Hispanic American republics,

based on his detection of what I would call a “colonial intentionality” on the part of the

U.S. expansionist political and economic interests to use Our America primarily to suit

their own benefit at Our America’s expense, let us look at the text “Nuestra América” as

a rhetorical strategy to rally the unified sentiment of his Latin American readers against

U.S. hegemony in the region. It is in embracing the vision of “Nuestra América” as

different from the America to our North that Martí hoped to rally a movement of

resistance to the U.S. economic and political hegemony taking place – or, as in the cases

of Cuba and Puerto Rico, imminently positioned to take place -- after the demise of

Spanish colonialism.

Martí begins “Nuestra América” with a call to a battle of ideas based on the “weapons

of judgment,” which he claims are much more valuable than actual tactics of war. This

confirms the view I proposed earlier regarding his desire for a united front that would

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bear diplomatic weight against U.S. hegemony in the region. Characterizing a village

mentality as one that fails to be concerned about the relationship between the local and

the global (I am rephrasing him using current terms) and, in that context, failing to see

that “giants with seven-league boots” can step on top of them, Martí calls for the

“awakening” of any remaining village mentality in America([1891] 1979, 37).

The obstacles Martí faced for people to rally behind his vision of “nuestra América”

rested not only in ignorance and apathy with regard to need for political change, but in

important structural problems that were a part of Latin American history. Martí’s essay

addresses both the external menace and the internal outlooks that must be changed to

resist it. Among the latter, two of the most important were (1) overcoming the

hierarchical and authoritarian mentality inherited from the colonial period and (2)

embracing the multi-racial composition of the continent which he called “nuestra

América mestiza” ([1891] 1979, 40). Without invoking or using our terms “colonialism”

and “racism,” it was clear that Martí was fighting a combination of both. He also

constantly battled the Ibero-American upper and middle class prejudices against working

and humble people, reporting that their gaze was focused on imitating European

fashionable trends. “Those sons of a carpenter, who are ashamed their father is a

carpenter! Those born in America, who are ashamed of the mother [sic] who raised

them, because they wear Indian aprons” ([1891] 1979, 8). He does not take a “standpoint

epistemology” to argue that whoever is born in America, or is of indigenous, black, or

mestizo origin, or comes from a certain class is in a cognitively privileged position to

understand his or her political situation. In fact he is fully aware that the masses, just as

the middle class, can only make progress if their consciousnesses are awakened and they

take on an anti-colonialist stance. He therefore bases the process of liberation from

colonialism on the mediating role played by instituting an anti-colonialist republic and, of

course, by the consciousness of all those who create and defend it. “The colony,” Martí

writes, “continued living in the republic; and our America is getting liberated from its

great errors . . . by the superior virtue . . . of the republic that fights against the colony”

([1891] 1979, 41). He observes the damage colonialism continued to exert in the new

republics, obstructing their emerging grass-roots democratic processes: “the hierarchical

constitution of the colonies resisted the democratic organization of the Republic, . . . the

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bookish redeemers did not understand that the revolution triumphed with the soul of the

earth [and that], freed at the voice of the liberator, with the soul of the earth one had to

govern, and not against it and without it” ([1891] 1979, 40). This failure to govern

appropriately meant that “America . . . suffers from the fatigue of accommodation

between the conflicting and hostile elements it inherited from a despotic and perverse

colonizer and the imported ideas and forms that, because they lack local reality, have

been delaying the logical government” (Martí [1891] 1979, 40).

What does Martí mean by “the logical government”? From what he says in the essay,

he seems to mean a government founded on the specific needs of its people, not on

imported, so-called universal formulas derived from European models – or for that

matter, from models imported from the United States. While he invokes Enlightenment

notions of reason and freedom, and of “the right of man [human being] to the exercise of

his reason,” for Martí the exercise of reason is not necessarily mediated by European

values or extra-territorial powers. He refers favorably to “the natural man” or to the “real

man”: “the natural man comes, outraged and strong, and knocks down the justice that

was accumulated in books, because it is not administered in accordance with the evident

needs of the country “([1891} 1979, 39-40). Further on he invokes an Enlightenment

ideal of moderation, appealing to the “serene harmony of Nature” and the “continent of

light,” where with the help of a new generation engaged in critical reading (lectura

crítica) “America is giving birth to the real man” ([1891] 1979, 41).

The real or natural man (or human being) of whom Martí speaks is someone for whom

the European concept of racial divisions and the socially hierarchical society built on it

do not apply. He places the distinction among races as something that can provoke

“useless hatreds” among peoples and instead proclaims that “nature’s justice” reveals

“the universal identity of man (human being)” ([1891] 1979, 43). “The soul springs

forth,” he continues, “equal and eternal, from bodies diverse in form and in color.

Anyone who promotes and propagates the opposition and hatred of the races sins against

humanity” ([1891] 1979, 43-44). On this view he claims that “there is no racial hatred,

because there are no races” ([1891], 1979, 43). By “race” Martí appears to mean a class

of human beings that, on account of their color or related physical characteristics, is

thought to be morally or psychologically superior or inferior to any other human type.

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The “natural man” (or human being) of whom he speaks refers to people of every color,

all of whom he embraced in his alternative concept of “nuestra América mestiza” ([1891]

1979, 40). He reasoned that racial prejudices were socio-culturally constructed and could

indeed result in significant injustice toward targeted populations. This is why he warns

that there are indeed some acquired characteristics, dispositions, and interests that

accumulate over time in various peoples and that, at restless national moments, can

trigger in a dominant group what I have called “colonial intentionalities” toward others

whose appearance, color, and customs differ from itself. Such colonial intentionalities

are described by Martí as “ideas and habits of expansion and acquisition, of vanity and

avarice, that from the latent state of national concerns could, in times of internal disorder

or of accelerating national identity (carácter acumulado del país) become a grave threat to

neighboring lands, isolated and weak, which the strong country declares extremely

wanting and inferior” ([1891] 1979, 44). Surely here he uses diplomatic terms to point

out the potential for U.S. expansionism toward the “isolated” and relatively “weak” Latin

American republics. He thinks the problem of neo-colonialism cannot be averted and

that, for the sake of the coming centuries’ peace, the facts of the problem should be

brought to light ([1891] 1979, 44).

Just as Martí enunciated a policy of governing according to the needs of specific

peoples in the light of reason and avoiding racial prejudice, he held a view of the type of

education that the peoples of “our America” should receive in order to reach maturity in

their democratic forms of government. He engaged in a tacit polemic with the Argentine

ruler and educator Domingo Sarmiento, who had proposed the binary model of

“civilization or barbarism” according to which the civilizing goal of the Hispanic

American republics should be the importation of European ideas and the overcoming of

the rural (considered backward) ways of life and thinking found in the Argentine pampas

(Sarmiento [1845] 1998). Without naming Sarmiento, Martí defended a different model

of education and cultural development for the American republics. “There is no battle

between civilization and barbarity,” he argued, “only [one] between false erudition and

nature” ([1891] 1979, 39). Here we see that Martí recognized the binary by which

Western colonizing thought places “barbarity” on the side of “nature,” raising its own

colonizing project to that of a civilizing mission. But he wisely pointed out that this

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binary itself is a form of “false erudition” and a false antagonism between culture and

nature. Since due to their exclusive reliance on Western models no Hispanic American

university curricula analyzed “the peculiar elements of American peoples,” he asks, what

kind of education will those aspiring to govern their countries receive? ([1891] 1979, 39)

In a pragmatic but also moral vein, he decried that unless the pursuit of truth included

seeking out the truth about your own people – and by this he meant seeking out the

subaltern populations that were marginalized from knowledge, culture, and power --, it

would not be possible to solve the problems that affect the people.

Politics, culture, pedagogy, and curriculum building are therefore intertwining

elements of Martí’s vision as developed in “nuestra América.” “The only way to free a

country from tyrannies is to know it and govern it according to such knowledge” ([1891]

1979, 40). For this objective he proposed a new kind of university curriculum centered

on the history of América “from the Incas to now” (40), or what today we would call a

non-Eurocentric and culturally inclusive education. The indigenous history of Our

America must take precedence to Europe’s view of history, in whose model the ancient

Greeks occupied the central place. “Our Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not

ours,” he states, referring to the continent’s indigenous peoples (40). At the same time,

Martí rejects separatism. He adds: “let us insert the world in our republics, but [using

the organic metaphor of a tree and its branches] the trunk must be that of our republics”

([1891] 1979, 40). He situates his discourse of cultural centeredness in the context of a

world political situation where, on the contrary, the education system of the former

Spanish colonies privileged European thought, ignoring the indigenous and African roots

of their populations.

Just as education should place priority on Our American history, the manner of

government should derive from the very own “constitution” of the country ([1891] 1979,

39), even if the aim seems to be conceived by Martí as a universal one: to attain a state

all those who contribute to it especially through their work enjoy freedom and prosperity.

This is an Enlightenment model, with one major variation. The methods and institutions

through which a reasonable government will be achieved are simply autochthonous.

While Martí appealed to Enlightenment concepts of “reason” and “liberty,” for him both

of these were grounded in the recognition and appreciation of a non-Eurocentric approach

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to Latin America’s socio-cultural reality. All those thereafter, who believe in these

ideales martianos, or Martian governance ideals, identify themselves by the description

nuestra Americanistas. Over the span of the twentieth century, a significant tradition of

Latin American philosophical and political thought has been based on this Martian ideal,

which has functioned as a criterion of freedom from colonialism and neo-colonialism in

diverse contexts. Perhaps the best known of these is the selective appropriation of

Martí’s ideas by the Marxist leadership of the Cuban revolution. But many other

examples abound, including a strong influence on a sector of twentieth-century Latin

American philosophy (Schutte 1993; Cerutti Guldberg 1998) and on the politics of U.S.

Latino and Chicano studies since the 1980s (Saldívar 1990; Acosta-Belén 1999).

In recent years Martí’s model of postcolonial Latin American emancipation has come

under attack. I am not speaking about the critique of his ideals as too utopian, which in a

way predate postmodern trends, but of critiques emerging in the wake of the recent neo-

liberal acceleration of global capitalism, which coincides with a postmodern intellectual

boom. While Martí’s essay has elicited disagreements from all parts of the political

spectrum, I will concentrate on arguments that circulate primarily in liberal and left-of-

center venues. In the next part of my paper I cover some of the principal objections

raised, whether specifically at his essay or more generally at the conceptual framework

on which it relies. The types of objections raised against Martí’s political manifesto, and

the responses such objections have evoked, provide a window into the type of questions

capturing the attention of intellectuals coping with the impact of neo-liberal globalization

processes on the very conceptual frameworks we deem appropriate for research in our

changing times.

FIRST OBJECTION: THE CASE FOR NORTH/SOUTH INTEGRATIONISM

One of the challenges for postcolonial critique in Latin America is to avoid the binary

judgments that point solely to Europe as the source of colonialism’s problems.

Surprisingly, this binary, often found in U.S. postcolonial studies, places the burden of

the colonial enterprise exclusively on Europe, neglecting the role played at least since

1898 by the United States.3 Under this paradigm, the Americas are seen as culturally

distinct from Western Europe, with the latter representing the culture primarily

3 1898 marks the United States’ defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War.

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responsible for all modern colonialist practices. Again, in this view, the asymmetries of

power throughout the hemisphere, whether across countries or within them, remain

unspecified. Yet, as Martí has shown, the situation is much more complex. In order to

resist the rising hegemony of the United States in the Americas, Martí created a

distinction between two Americas, “theirs” and “ours.” Martí supersedes a geographical

mapping of the Americas with a mapping responding to the cultural and political values

and intentionalities of its peoples. In other words, he realizes that geography alone is not

the ultimate boundary either between Europe and the Americas or between Anglo-Saxon

and Latin America. Colonialism has shown that there is no correspondence between a

geographical space and the system of governance and/or economic interests that rule

therein. Martí’s concept of “our America” served as a way to try to point to this

dissonance. This concept helped to empower Latin Americans to appropriate their own

space and cultural creations, in such a way as both to resist the expanding neighbor to the

North and to demand the respect of the U.S. population. Without it, the critical analysis

of Latin America’s postcoloniality would be deeply impoverished.

For its part, the United States government tries to foster the notion of One America in

which its hegemony is not challenged explicitly. It manipulates its own rhetoric of

respect toward its Southern neighbors, which it ties to a Pan-Americanism where the

common ties among the hemispheric republics conforming to its principles are stressed.4

Pan-Americanist rhetoric also appeals to the alleged self-interest of the Latin Americans

with regard to economic enrichment (growth). Whether it uses force or persuasion, the

United States wants a united hemisphere where its leadership (hegemony) in economic

and political matters goes without question. The South’s poverty, racial differences, and

cultural/linguistic differences are perhaps the factors that still repel, for many

Northerners, the thought of a full integration for Latin Americans into U.S. society. So,

from the part of the North, a wedge is driven between the goals of neo-liberal capitalist

economic and political integration (as exemplified by treaties such as NAFTA), which

suits the North’s interests, and full integration, which is found threatening given the

4 One of the ways in which the U.S. government shows its repudiation of the socialist government of Cuba is by excluding it from its Pan-Americanist meetings.

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stereotyped representations of the impoverished, dark-skinned, or, at best, exotic, Latin

American “others.”

Integrationists in the field of Latin American Studies hold that since the fall of the

Soviet Union and the rapid acceleration of globalization processes in its wake there is no

longer any significant justification for dividing the study of the Americas into Latin

American and Caribbean Studies, on one hand, and “American Studies,” on the other.5

This view responds to the increasing economic integration of the Americas and the

South-to-North migration inserting millions of Latinos into U.S. civil society. It

observes, correctly, that the historic, economic, and cultural boundaries between Anglo

and Hispanic America no longer hold. But from these observations it deduces that Latin

American Studies should be superseded by Inter-American Studies, where “American”

comes to mean the whole of the Americas. This representation of the Americas appears

to be very egalitarian because it purports to treat all inhabitants of the Americas in the

same way. It gives the South’s presence in the North through migration the same weight

as the North’s influence on the South’s economic and political agendas. But in doing so,

it overlooks a great asymmetry in power between North and South, in addition to keeping

silent on the less than satisfactory solutions the United States government currently

employs to deal with what it considers excessive South-to-North migration. Believing

that the vast number of Latino immigrants in the United States, whether legal or illegal, is

sufficient to indicate their economic and political power, Inter-American integrationism

fails to note the current attempts of the U.S. administration to manage illegal immigration

by proposing to legalize a fixed-term length of stay in the U.S. while mandating the

continual rotation of the work force so “generously” granted temporary legality. These

types of solutions, however, propose to legalize the exploitation of foreign labor on the

condition of eventually expelling the laborers themselves, who are mandated to return to

their countries of origin after a term of three to six years in exchange for their receiving

temporary legal status. How convenient for the employer, yet how disrespectful of the

laborer is this proposed solution! Moreover, it should be noted that Latinos with the

5 For an example of this position see Andrzej Dembicz, “Los estudios latinoamericanos y las Américas, o sea, es posible un latinoamericanismo interamericanista?,” Revista del CELSA [Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Universidad de Varsovia], No. 5 (2003): 41-52. To some extent, I have oversimplified Dembicz’s argument to delineate the integrationist position presented here.

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power to vote as citizens of the United States have no collective power of representation

unless they reside in Latino territorial enclaves, given that representation in U.S.

democracy is territorially determined. While it is important to realize, as the

integrationist position asserts, that the recent globalization processes have broken down

many traditional cultural, economic, and political barriers, and that the reciprocal impact

of North/South activities is much higher than in years past, I do not see that we are served

well by a paradigm that seeks to minimize the boundaries that make it possible for us to

still point out the differences between a country with the military and economic power to

set the global agenda and those without that power, whose cultures, economies, and

political traditions differ in kind for the former. For it is not as if the hemisphere’s

inhabitants are simply interacting with each other, trading, and moving from place to

place without restriction. The reality is that their interactions are still to a very large part

mediated and regulated by governments, whose relations are themselves determined by

geopolitical conditions resting on anything but equality.

SECOND OBJECTION: THE REJECTION OF A SUBALTERN MODEL OF

INTEGRATION AND OF THE SYMBOLIC USE OF MESTIZAJE

A second and, in my view, more important objection to Martí’s vision of “nuestra

América” comes from a standpoint almost opposite the above. This standpoint is anti-

integrationist, arguing that to integrate is to impose an artificial and most likely unjust

unity over a perennially diversified population. Influenced by a postmodern distrust

against any unifying strategy of representation, it takes “nuestra América” to be too

enveloping a concept, one which hides the near-infinite modalities of perspectives, ethnic

and racial groupings, and economic sectors in Latin America. Moreover, this standpoint

rejects the validity of the notion of “mestizaje” (the mixture of races and cultures) as a

progressive and anti-racist notion. It claims, on the contrary, that for Hispanic

Americans to generalize our main cultural difference from Anglo-Americans through the

notion of “mestizaje” is to marginalize or silence Blacks, indigenous peoples, and others

whose racial or cultural heritage may not fit neatly into the “mixture” of one race/culture

with others. This standpoint sees “mestizaje” as an assimilationist concept whose goal

was to “whiten” the representation of the indigenous and Black parts of the population. It

sees “mestizaje” not as the antidote for the concept of white racial purity but as the

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equivalent of “whiteness” with respect to Blacks and indigenous peoples. By association,

Martí is seen as a spokesperson for white Hispanic America, regardless of his attempt to

include African descendants and indigenous people under the symbolism of “nuestra

América mestiza” and regardless of his critique of the ways indigenous people and

Blacks were treated in nineteenth-century United States (see Acosta-Belén 1999, 86).

For example, such critics point to the legacy of the Mexican revolution and to the

political will of the Mexican ruling class to idealize mestizaje while the indigenous

sectors of the population continued to be marginalized, receiving substandard treatment.

Reading Martí by way of some subsequent idealizers of mestizaje such as the Mexican

philosopher José Vasconcelos, such criticism asserts that “reducing all cultural

differences to a single principle – a mestizismo or romanticized indigenism – was the

way to ensure the emergence of a popular State that would at the same time guarantee the

‘national unity’”6 (Castro-Gómez 1998, 142). The social movements of the last four

decades of the twentieth century have demanded representation for specific

constituencies in their separate identities – following more recent twentieth-century

models of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, gender-diversified, and multi-cultural society. In

view of such activist developments, Martí’s integrationist anti-colonial identity politics of

the last part of the nineteenth century appears to some not to be able to keep pace with a

later century’s mobilizations according to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other more

particular interests whose main concerns are not to defend an anti-colonialist cultural

identity as such, but rather to demand political representation for their specific

constituencies.

Nonetheless, others argue that Martí’s anti-colonialist vision of two oppositional

Americas, broadly construed and re-interpreted in our own times of global capitalist

acceleration impelled by the United States and the transnational migration of people from

South to North, is both conscious of internal differentiations among Latin America’s

exploited groups and especially relevant to the construction of a contemporary

oppositional pan-Latina/o or trans-Latino hemispheric consciousness. As the Puerto

Rican feminist and Latina scholar Edna Acosta-Belén states: “[Martí’s] pan-national

6 “La reducción de todas las diferencias culturales a un solo principio – un mestizismo o indigenismo romantizado – era la vía para asegurar el surgimiento de un Estado popular que garantizara al mismo tiempo la ‘unidad nacional.’”

15

affirmation of a multicultural and multiracial nuestra América also takes on great

contemporary significance as we strive to put an end to European and Anglo-American

ethnocentrism by decolonizing and deconstructing the cultural mythologies and received

knowledge about subaltern groups perpetuated within the dominant Western tradition”

(Acosta-Belén 1999, 86). In fact, Martí’s idealization of a voluntary nuestra

Americanista identity over a century ago now seems immensely helpful as a strategy to

guide the construction of the new pan-ethnic “Latina/o” identities imposed on or adopted

by immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin American to the United States. One of the

advantages of Martí’s notion of nuestra América noted by Acosta-Belén, in addition to its

oppositional anti-colonialist quality, is its transcending of national boundaries, in a way

that can ground “reciprocal interactions and bi-directional exchanges” among the U.S.

Latina/o and Latin American/Caribbean populations, rather than treat each as a separate

entity lodged within national borders (Acosta-Belén 1999, 82-83).

The Puerto Rican sociologist Juan Flores argues against adopting the U.S. Latina/o

identity in the mainstream form in which it is being forced upon and constructed for

Puerto Ricans, Chicanas/os, Mexican-Americans, and all the other groups of migrants or

descendants of migrants living in the United States. He distinguishes between the

formation of voluntary pan-Latino or trans-Latino identities -- which would take into

account the specific characteristics of each group as well as the need to affirm an anti-

colonialist identity -- and the conservative, manipulative use of the Latino/a or Hispanic

identity to normalize and assimilate this population into the global economic and political

agenda of the United States. Flores notes that Puerto Ricans resist adapting to the

“Latino” designation. He alerts other groups called to identify with this category that the

experience of Puerto Rico as colonized by the United States must not be removed from

our consciousness of U.S. Latino/a identities. In this view, resistance to U.S. colonialism

should be incorporated as an important factor in the conscious construction of Pan-

Latina/o identities. Flores also points to existing differences among so-called Latino/a

groups – for example, between the Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in Chicago – to stress the

fact that even with the adoption of pan-ethnic identities, it essential to “emphasize the

need for an eminently flexible, inclusive concept based on a clear understanding of

16

historical differences and particularities” (Flores 1999, 128).7 He seeks a conceptual

framework offering the “hope that the idea and study of ‘Latino’ might transcend – and

transgress – the domestic confines of U.S. public discourse on politics and cultural

identity, and engage (or re-engage) it to the global processes of which it is a part” (Flores

1999,128). Such a conceptual framework is what Acosta-Belén and others propose

Martí’s notion of nuestra América can fulfill as long as it is re-read one hundred years

later to include the specificities and particularities of the great mass of social movements

challenging the effects of both European colonialism and U.S. imperialism on the

continent.

Another contemporary re-deployment of Martí, also originating in the context of the

emerging Latino and Ethnic Studies in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s,

appeared in the fields of literary, ethnic, and cultural studies. José Saldívar, currently

professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, argued in an early essay challenging the

culturally hegemonous content within the field of American literature that “American

literatures can only be understood as part of the larger debates and confrontations

between “Our America” and the “other America,” which is not ours (Saldívar 1990, 78).

In what he called “the dialectics of our America,” Saldívar extrapolated Martí’s analysis

of U.S. political, economic, and cultural hegemony over Latin America to challenge the

exclusion of ethnic literatures and criticism from the field of American Studies in the

United States. Influenced by Edward Said’s critique of Orientalist discourse as well as

Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Marxist cultural analyses of Latin American and Caribbean

resistance to Western colonialism and U.S. imperialism, Saldívar – from the standpoint of

Chicano studies – revalidated Martí’s notion of nuestra América as a useful perspective

for reclaiming the missing voices from Our America in the North American literary

canon. He likens Martí’s role in promoting the notion of nuestra América, which serves

to ground the legacy of anti-colonialist Latin American and Caribbean cultural

production, to Emerson’s essay, “The American Scholar” (1837), “which established the

grounds for a national, popular American literature” (Saldívar 1990, 66). But for

Saldívar, what radicalizes Martí’s conception of nuestra América even further, enabling

7 I would add, in the same spirit, that it is not sufficient to note the differences among groups, since there can also be important differences within any particular national-ethnic group, whereas the “image” of any particular group tends to be stereotyped beyond / against the desires of all its members.

17

its implications and repercussions to link up with the late twentieth-century debates on

the role of postcolonial intellectuals in U.S. ethnic and cultural studies, is the materialist

reconversion of Martí’s notion by the Cuban Marxist postcolonial critic Roberto

Fernández Retamar. “Fernández Retamar has produced perhaps the most powerful model

of oppositional critical practice in Our America since Martí,” wrote Saldívar in 1990

(Saldívar 1990, 73).

The author of Caliban, “Our America and the West,” and other postcolonial essays,

Fernández Retamar belonged to a generation of Latin American theorists who, energized

by the cultural and political hemispheric impact of the Cuban revolution and by the works

of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, among others, shed the idealist metaphysics typical of

many earlier Latin American writers. As Saldívar points out: “Fernández Retamar’s

criticism recognizes the political materiality of culture. He does not merely turn ‘Our

American culture’ into a literary myth [an allusion to idealist appropriations of Martí],

but as a Cuban Marxist he describes how culture is related to the idea of hegemony”

(Saldívar 1990, 75). In this view, the economic and political hegemony of the West in

defining what counts as Latin American culture – down to the very nomenclature to

describe the European invasion and colonization of the hemisphere as the “discovery” of

America – requires oppositional resistance in the form of new intellectual allegiances and

a new literary canon opening the way for the recognition of new Latin American

narratives and the work of Chicanos/as, African Americans, and other “minority” writers

in the United States. From the encounters of radical and progressive writers gathered at

the Casa de las Américas Cuban cultural center, directed by Fernández Retamar, Saldívar

deduced (correctly, in my view), that there was much that the literature of the Americas

(North and South) had in common, but that to appreciate what they had in common one

had to apply a genealogy regarding the regimes of power they were resisting. In this

regard, José Martí’s “Nuestra América” – later enhanced by the Calibanesque rebellion

against colonialism embraced by Fernández Retamar and many other postcolonial writers

and intellectuals -- was the definitive text through which subsequent alliances for or

against colonialist regimes of power could be interpreted. The outcome of this analysis is

to link together powerful works by writers of color in the United States with the Latin

American and Caribbean leftist postcolonial writers, understanding that, despite the wide

18

differences in style or languages of composition, what unites them is their alternative

visions for “our America” and their resistance to that “other America” which is not ours,

the America complicit with the work of Western colonialism.

In this section I have therefore emphasized that the difference between those who

charge that Martí’s idealistic, unifying notion of nuestra América is no longer acceptable

in our time and those who on the contrary still see it not only as relevant but as central to

an understanding of postcolonial intellectuality lies largely in the latter’s ability to re-

deploy Martí’s notion expanding the political and cultural connections among and

beyond the marginalized and exploited groups Martí identified in his own time. In

particular, those theorists and critics who take Latinas/os in the United States as bridge-

builders between North and South in the labor of deconstructing or otherwise resisting

the legacies of colonialism appear to have much better insights into the continued

relevance of Martí’s “Nuestra América” for a postcolonial critique of today’s globalized

economies, politics, and cultures.

THIRD OBJECTION: POSTMODERNISM AS THE ONLY VIABLE EPISTEMIC

FRAMEWORK FOR LATIN AMERICAN POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE

The third objection I consider against the continued relevance of nuestra Americanista

ideals is the theoretical argument that only a postmodern epistemic framework is

acceptable as a basis for Latin American postcolonial theory. According to this

argument, which has been most coherently elaborated by the Colombian philosopher

Santiago Castro-Gómez, what determines the true nature of postcolonial critique is not an

oppositional political and economic stance against colonialism and its aftermath in the

Americas, but the adoption of a postmodern epistemic framework by Latin American

philosophers and social theorists. This argument is partly based on the premise that

Western colonialism and Western modernity are basically two sides of the same coin,

from which it is deduced that only by moving beyond the conceptual paradigms of

modernity can one avoid reproducing the founding ideologies of Western colonialism.8

Personally, I think Castro-Gómez’s argument suffers from a methodological

reductionism inattentive to the full complexity of Latin American philosophy and social

8 What this reasoning cannot guarantee is that postmodern conceptual paradigms as such would be free necessarily from some of the founding ideologies of Western colonialism. The complexity of and lack of agreement on what counts as a postmodern conceptual paradigm would also be at issue here.

19

thought in the last two centuries. As I have argued in my book, Cultural Identity and

Social Liberation in Latin American Thought (1993), there is a long and diverse tradition

of Latin American philosophy and social thought focused precisely on a critique of the

conquest and colonization of the Americas, the marginalization and exclusion of

indigenous and African thought, the Third World status of Latin American societies vis-

à-vis the advanced capitalist societies that impoverished them, the role of Western

intellectual hegemony in the formation of native intellectuals, and a host of related

questions typical of postcolonial intellectual and political debates. Castro-Gómez’s

argument against the existence of a postcolonial Latin American philosophy is similarly

inattentive to the nuances of postcolonial theory insofar as the latter takes any distance

from postmodernism. In this regard, as I pointed out in my introduction, Edward Said

distinguishes between postcolonial theory and postmodernism in his 1994 Afterword to

Orientalism, distancing himself from a postmodern epistemic framework despite his debt

to Foucault. Likewise, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, an important postcolonial feminist

theorist, has recently clarified that she was misunderstood in the past when her critique of

Western representations of Third World Women was taken to mean that she was rejecting

any claim whatsoever to universality (Mohanty 2003, 505). Clearly, no postcolonial

theorist would try to defend a Western European notion of rights or of universal reason,

but many have argued either for an expanded notion of reason where non-Western -- and

I would add, hybrid -- perspectives are equally appreciated (Wiredu 1996) or for an ethics

of dialogue where the alterity of the subaltern is respected and nurtured (Schutte 1998).

Castro-Gómez does make some very interesting points which may take on a more

specific meaning than his broad reductive generalizations. He rejects the premise that

there is any kind of pure alterity that stands opposed to the West in a binary epistemic

construction where a blameless “we” is exteriorly located to European modernity, which

furthermore is represented as a “will to dominance” in its totality (Castro-Gómez 1998,

87). While this binary is found in some Latin American texts that oppose modernity for a

wide variety of reasons, such a dichotomy is not operative in José Martí’s notion of

nuestra América. The reason is that for Martí nuestra América is not located wholly

outside of Europe, nor is Europe wholly outside of us, since our population includes its

mixed and transgressive offspring. Similarly, according to Martí the cultural

20

positionality of nuestra América does not proclaim its citizens free from failures,

corruption, or vices -- only that we must make every effort to overcome these if we are to

overturn both new and old forms of injustice. Castro-Gómez criticizes Martí’s reliance

on the concepts of harmony and on the “aesthetics of the beautiful” that typified Latin

American modernism (Castro-Gómez 1998, 140). He argues that postcolonial thought

cannot rely on the aesthetics of the beautiful but must, following Lyotard’s analysis of

Kant, switch to an aesthetics of the sublime which, unlike the aesthetics of the beautiful,

is not totalizing. But why should these conceptual models arising within European

debates on postmodernity and aesthetics serve as the final criteria to determine whether

or not the tenets and practices of Latin American modernism are legitimate? Isn’t much

of the point of Martí’s postcolonial critique that we must overcome the seduction to

ground our values and ways of thinking in the latest cultural trends found in the United

States and Europe? Why must our Latin American postcolonial status be delegitimated

(even when we criticize the economic and political effects of colonialism) because some

of us fail to theorize “beauty” or “difference” in just the way advocated by Lyotard –

especially someone like Martí, who lived long before Lyotard was born? It seems to me

that, in the name of difference, the type of reductive argumentation followed by Castro-

Gómez actually destroys our sensitivities to appreciate the actual cultural differences

found in the many creative approaches used to resist colonialism and its sequels in Latin

America. But, to be fair to him, reductionist arguments are not so uncommon in these

types of discussions. His reductionist claims are more interesting than most, insofar he is

proposing a leftist critique of the Left, in a kind of revisionist move against the

metaphysical and epistemic assumptions of older generations of intellectuals and

scholars.

At bottom, Castro-Gómez is concerned (and so am I) with the danger of

homogenizing the categories that point to our differences. He rejects the aesthetics of

harmony and the beautiful because he believes they will keep us trapped in homogeneous

and normalizing representations that stagnate and block the processes of political

resistance against oppression. I sympathize strongly with his concern. To bring up the

example of the ideology of mestizaje again – clearly, if or when the representation of

mestizaje becomes homogenized to stand for all of Latin America, and idealized within

21

the aesthetics of harmony and the beautiful, so to make it appear that no racial or ethnic

conflicts exists, then what we are dealing with is not postcolonial critical thought but a

resurgence of racism under a different name. Similarly, the aesthetics of harmony and

the beautiful can be very damaging to women, and are often employed in the service of

heterosexist white privilege. But I want to add that it is also possible to reject such

colonizing models of beauty and instead find beauty in what is simple or subaltern. It is

possible to invoke the notions of harmony or peace yet defer acknowledgment of their

attainment as long as violence, injustice, and inequality continue to characterize basic

social, economic, and political relations in contemporary societies. I want to claim that it

is not a total contradiction to speak of the “struggle for peace.” The seduction only

occurs when we think that a particular course of political action will achieve peace or

liberation once and for all, when in fact a more realistic appraisal of the human condition

shows us that such a “final” moment is nothing but an illusion.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

To many contemporary Latin Americans residing in Latin America it seems

sometimes as if ”postcolonial theory” is just a debate going on in the Northern

academies. Unlike Castro-Gómez, who argues that no Latin American thinkers have

been postcolonial because they have lacked a postmodern epistemic framework – and

perhaps on account of arguments such as his --, they feel that their intellectual traditions

are left out of the debate. In the production of postcolonial theory, the South-to-North

migrant appears to hold a privileged position. In response to this concern I would like to

say that while our experiences as migrants are very important and may serve to bridge

complex problems across different cultures, the postcolonial condition is indeed much

more varied and broader than any migrant or group of migrants’ experiences. Still, I

myself am very much persuaded by Bhabha’s psychoanalytical reading of the migrant’s

split subjectivity as a key to deciphering the different temporalities inscribed in

postcolonial histories. We must pay attention to the complexities and ambiguities of

signification emerging as a result of “migration, diaspora, displacement, [and] relocation”

(Bhabha 1994, 172). Part of this complexity involves relating to the intellectual

production of those parts of the world where we no longer (primarily) reside. In this

spirit I want to conclude by submitting a word or two of caution about the risks of

22

speaking about Latin America to audiences in North America, and the kinds of

displacements that result for postcolonial critics, intellectuals, and scholars residing in

Latin America who do not necessarily write in, or have the option of, being translated to,

English. As the Uruguayan literary critic Hugo Achúgar observes: “We should not

forget that one thing is to be postcolonial in English and another in Spanish, Portuguese,

Bayano, Quechua, Aymara, Guarini, Papiamento and equivalents” (Achúgar 1998, 278).

Indeed, postcolonial critique involves at least two different components: the

historical parameters and conditions of decolonization in specific nations and parts of the

world, and the speaking positions from which such historical conditions have been

theorized, imagined, or otherwise represented. In recent years, the trend has been to

emphasize the latter rather than the former, in a relative victory of semiotic analysis over,

let’s say, Marxist or feminist political theory. In philosophy the debate over the

hermeneutics of deciphering the various nuances of speaking positions and what the

U.S./Argentine postcolonial theorist Walter Mignolo calls “loci of enunciation” (Mignolo

2000, 182) has taken precedence over the debates regarding democratization processes in

Latin American civil society and the expansion of rights for the various subaltern groups

that may constitute its particular populations. Furthermore, the intellectual legacy from

which diverse critics in Latin America speak is differently constituted from that which

grounds the Latin American migrant to the United States. In this vein, Achúgar inquires:

“What is the agenda that determines the relevance or legitimacy of knowledges? Is it the

agendas founded in the battles that minorities carry forth in North American civil society

or the agendas designed in the bosom of Latin American civil society?” (Achúgar 1998,

281). He argues that although they are not exactly comparable or the same, what the

North calls postcolonial studies is something that Latin Americans have been doing since

the nineteenth century under different names, among them in particular, what has been

called pensamiento Latinoamericano (Latin American thought) (Achúgar 1998, 280). I

think he is correct in noting that postcolonial Latin American thought can be both modern

and postmodern and that it includes, as did Martí’s vision of Our America, both migrants

and non-migrants. What distinguishes this vision from postcolonial thought emerging

elsewhere is that the evolving vision of nuestra América “arises from the history of the

23

agendas of Latin American society” (Achúgar 1998, 281) and the social movements

found therein.

In my book Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought I

provided an analysis of several generations of twentieth-century postcolonial Latin

American thought in relation to important social and political movements of the time –

socialism, nationalism, liberation movements, and feminism. In studying the thought of

the early twentieth-century Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, I noted that the

question of national identity, or national formation, for Mariátegui, emerged differently

from the question of national identity in Western Europe. Because Mariátegui theorized

the Spanish conquest as a violation or interruption of a highly sophisticated Inca

civilization, he was aware of “the contingency of modernity vis-à-vis other possible

cultural formations that might have evolved on the continent “(Schutte 1993, 117; 28-29).

He conceived of the Peruvian nation as a plurality of communities of different ethnic

origins (primarily, Hispanic and indigenous), wherein different senses of time prevailed

(for the European descendant, linear time; for the indigenous peoples, cyclical time).

This is why when I read Homi Bhabha’s famous essay, “DissemiNation: Time, narrative

and the margins of the modern nation” (in The Location of Culture), I am reminded time

and again of the affinities between the postmodern migrant’s perspective of “the

disjunctive time of the nation’s modernity” invoked by Bhabha (1994, 142) and

Mariátegui’s insistence that the indigenous sense of time must be allowed a distinctive

place in the modern Peruvian nation. When Bhabha asserts that “historians transfixed on

the event and the origins of the [modern] nation never ask, and political theorists

possessed of the ‘modern’ totalities of the nation . . . never pose, the essential question of

the representation of the nation as a temporal process” (1994, 142), I want to point to

Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, published in Lima in 1928,

which indeed questioned the clash of temporalities occurring in America with the Spanish

conquest.

Just as Martí had done before Mariátegui and many others would do as well, the

postcolonial Latin American thinkers knew that at the base of the political realities they

theorized there were disjunctive time frames which did not dilute but rather enriched the

cultures of nuestra América. The time gaps and differences from European modernity

24

were evident in many Latin American narratives, if only because indigenous peoples did

not share modern Europe’s sense of time, while African religions bear a spirited

relationship to nature, rejecting Western monotheism. The official state ideologies of

“progreso” (progress) and “retraso” (backwardness), always measured in terms of the

demands of Western capitalism and Eurocentric notions of culture, stand in contrast to

the plurality of nuestra Americanista counter-narratives. Yet, as I have argued and

shown, the absence of an explicitly held deconstructive or postmodern perspective does

not mean that postcolonial theory will be absent from Latin America until its

theoreticians are sufficiently postmodern. What it means is that postcolonial theory in the

United States will be further enriched if it admits the wide plurality of voices from/of

Latin America, rather than restrict their theoretical legitimacy based on highly selective

criteria regarding the hermeneutic pedigree of the writers’ loci of enunciation.

25

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